Telling a Different Story: Grace Tiffany’s Ariel (2005)

Set in the Bermuda Triangle, Grace Tiffany’s novel Ariel (published in 2005) originally appropriates the Shakespearean romance, providing a long prequel to the hypotext’s dramatized events and rewriting its story. The novel centres on Ariel, whose origin is now that of a spirit born from the hallucinated brain of a Jewish mariner; he is an unfortunate traveller who survived the shipwreck of his master’s ship only to die of thirst on a faraway island. There Ariel remains and meets, in turn, Sycorax, who is also stranded there, pregnant; Caliban, her son; and, later on, Prospero and Miranda. But this Ariel is nothing like the saucy yet gentle spirit we find in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s play has long been discussed in the light of issues such as male-controlled cultural hegemony, heteronormativity, and, of course, colonialism: Tiffany’s novel does bring all these concerns to the fore but—surprisingly enough (also taking into account its intended readership)—fails to question them, and even seems to bolster Eurocentric and patriarchal discourses that, to all intents and purposes, stain the novel’s (happy?) ending and, eventually, tell a different and even unreceptive story.